Surgeon at Arms

money. He had admittedly specialized in offering hope to young actresses who saw their names one day in lights, or to old actresses for whom the lights were starting to dim. He had erased the scars of hunting accidents from the cheeks as neatly as those of dissipation from below the eyes, and the ‘Trevose nose’ was famous in London society—a little too famous: women were starting to recognize its distinctive handiwork across crowded cocktail parties. Perhaps he had made and spent too much money, lived too fashionably. Perhaps his private life unfitted him for employment by His Majesty. He had recently had a close shave from the General Medical Council over the famous ‘infamous conduct’. Or perhaps, he told himself wearily, some stupid clerk in the Ministry had simply mislaid his file.
    When the war was a month old, before he had set eyes on Smithers Botham, Graham was surprised by a telephone call inviting him to meet Brigadier Haileybury at his club the following evening. Before the war, Haileybury, too, had been a civilian plastic surgeon, and the pair had for twenty years lived in mutual dislike. It was a dignified but deadly feud, and like all feuds afforded the onlookers much innocent amusement. But Graham accepted the invitation. He had nothing else to do. And it would be the first time that he could remember Haileybury buying him a drink.
    The newly created brigadier was already waiting. Of all the man’s virtues, Graham found his strict punctuality the most regularly irritating.
    ‘Well, Trevose, you’re looking fit.’
    ‘That’s very kind. So are you.’
    ‘I’m finding it difficult to get enough exercise, sitting all day behind a desk.’ Haileybury held an administrative job in the Army medical services. He had a flair for organizing people. ‘Shall we find a quiet corner in the morning room?’
    Haileybury ordered sherry. He was a tall, thin, bald, graceless man with large red hands more fitting a stevedore than a surgeon, wearing an immaculate uniform with red tabs. ‘I’ve just seen Tom Raleigh,’ he stated.
    ‘Oh, Tom.’ Tom Raleigh was a young plastic surgeon, Graham’s partner until the arrangement was disrupted through the Trevose temperament, which was almost as famous in London as the nose.
    ‘You know he’s been called up for the R.A.M.C.? I could have had him left in civvy street had you wanted his services. But you’ll remember, when I enquired, you turned the idea down very flatly indeed.’
    Graham did remember. He’d learned Tom had supplied evidence leading to that close shave with the General Medical Council. A stroke of treachery he was disinclined to overlook. But he said only, ‘His services? No one seems to find any use for my own.’
    ‘I assure you that you’re misinformed, Trevose,’ Haileybury said hastily. ‘I admit there was some hesitation....’ He stopped. Under the circumstances, it seemed best not to recall the past. ‘Anyway, you’ll shortly have your chance to join the civilian Emergency Medical Service. I thought that something really should be done about you.’
    The condecension grated on Graham, but he said nothing. He was adjusting himself to being a nonentity, while Haileybury was now one of the nation’s élite, as you could tell from a glance at his clothes.
    ‘But I have something better to offer.’
    Graham looked up.
    ‘I have never made a secret of my disagreement with you on many things, Trevose, personal and professional.’
    ‘No, you haven’t,’ Graham concurred.
    Haileybury had passed his civilian years between the wars with a modesty indistinguishable from drabness, his bachelor home in Richmond as plain as his sister’s cooking, his few amusements harmless to the point of boredom. Where Graham saw plastic surgery as an exciting art in the most rewarding medium of all, human flesh and blood, to Haileybury it was a science, the calculated repair of injuries and defects rather than interference with the endowments of Nature. He would have been almost as reluctant to reshape an actress’s nose as to perform her abortion.
    ‘Neither have I made a secret of my admiration for your workmanship,’ Haileybury went on. ‘Your surgery on burns at Blackfriars called for far wider recognition.’
    ‘I found it a very interesting branch of plastics.’
    ‘I supposed you didn’t publish it because you found the surgery of pretty women even more interesting.’
    ‘That’s unfair. It was simply because I hadn’t the